The election of Donald Trump to become in due course the American President is an extraordinary development. Given the campaign, he made a gracious acceptance of Hillary Ciinton’s phone call acknowledging defeat.As far as I know she has not made a public announcement.

It was a great surprise to hear that Bernie Sanders was not played on the Monopoly Mass Media. They were apparently more interested in their own commentary and waiting for Donald Trump’s (originally the German name was Drumpt).

Super Tuesday has come and gone. Ted Cruze has won in Texas and Oklahoma, otherwise the Donald has been successful. The real contest for the presidency is among the Democratic Party nominees.(This is despite the suggestion that the swings and roundabouts favour the Republican candidate this year.)

Normally these people in the American way are given a racial classification, and described as working.

The presumption made is that neo-liberalism is new. The cruelty and structural violence has much in common with the conditions created for British underclass in the 19th Century. The Basingstoke Union Workhouse in 1881 describes the inmates. Unlike then, migration is not an option.

This is a provocative suggestion. However, for governments to allow the cutting down forests, the source of oxygen,thus destroying ecosystems we cannot recreate, and particularly refusing to take effective actions on climate change the case is clear.(more…)

I found the story of the Ballarat mosque on Facebook. It was put up by the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR). In its way it is an illustration of how in the era of developing modern communications, the local and global merge.(more…)

Bradley Manning’s military espionage trial has now entered the sentencing stage. He has gone from being recognized in court as “the accused” to “the defendant”. This phase of the trial is expected to last some months.(more…)

Obviously, I don’t know much about law, but I thought everyone was entitled to present a defence, and regardless of circumstances there was to be a presumption of innocence. Furthermore, the accused’s ultimate fate was at the discretion of the jury. Apparently, none of this applies in the case of Edward Snowden, who supplied information on pervasive information collection by the US Government.(more…)

Using terms such as show trial, as Julian Assange has done, Chris Hedges refers to the trial process as “a judicial lynching”. in relation to the military trial of Bradley Manning could be understood as emotional thinking. (more…)

It is now fifty years since Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham Jail. He writes, “You are quite right to call for negotiation. Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor”.(more…)

The United States, which by its own exertion makes its the specimen for examination under the laboratory slide, is a land of overriding ideologies, since its inception as a democracy institutionalized in the form of the classical architecture of slavery.(more…)

Last week Bradley Manning made a statement to the Military Hearing, after a period of incarceration now exceeding three thousand days, with incidental torture along the way. So much for the presumption of a speedy trial.(more…)

Yesterday the United States jointly commemorated Martin Luther King’s day and the inauguration of the President and Vice President. Obama will leave a historical footnote as the first African-American to be both elected and re-elected as President.(more…)